03What to See & DoCULTURE
TODAY’S PICK — MAR — PRAÇA MAUÁ
No Martins, Sortilégios de desvio — the MAR reopens Thursday, and this is the indoor day for it
If you give one wet afternoon to Rio culture this week, give it to the MAR, which reopens Thursday after its Wednesday closure and runs the No Martins solo Sortilégios de desvio through September 20. The 60% rain makes the indoor case, and the museum sits a covered two-minute walk from the Praça Mauá VLT stop. This is the first institutional solo for the São Paulo-born painter (b. 1991), curated by Marcelo Campos with Amanda Bonan, Thayná Trindade, Amanda Rezende and Jean Carlos Azuos, on the second floor of the 1916 building restored for the museum’s 2013 opening. Per ART AFRICA, the show “unfolds as a field of deviations, where form and meaning are continually reconfigured.”
What to look for: the figures in everyday clothes rather than the folkloric or religious costumes that anchored most twentieth-century Afro-Brazilian painting, a single editorial choice that does most of the work. Look at the small paper studies where Martins thinks through the territorial-violence question before painting it, the large-format finished oils on the second floor, and the catalogue text by Campos. The show sets two registers against each other: the visual denunciation of state violence and the desvios, the ways Black Brazilian life sidesteps that violence to keep culture, leisure and memory alive. The institutional scale is earned.
